Chinatown

Singapore has long recognized the cultural diversity that exists, and the need for everyone to get along in such a small area. The City traditionally has several neighborhoods, and rather than follow the US example of “slash and burn” to implement Urban Renewal.

The tour group that we were on was primarily Chinese, and hence the emphasis on Chinatown for this morning.

In the book “1000 places to See Before You Die”, there are two things about Singapore listed. The first is the Raffles Hotel, named after the founding father. This is where the drink the “Singapore Sling” was invented, apparently, and that’s one of those things you shouldn’t miss.

The other is called a “hawker center”, and is essentially an open air food court. Singapore had the food vendors like we saw along the streets in Thailand. They figured out that these were pretty messy and, for the most part have put them into what we in the US would think of as food courts. They’re still open air, but they have amenities you might not find on the street – like running water, toilets, and trash cans.

All important, since there’s a $500 fine for urinating in the street.

All in all, that seems entirely reasonable.

Chinatown is all decked out for the holidays. There are still some Christmas decorations up here, but they’re overshadowed by the Chinese New Year decorations.

Buildings in this neighborhood tend to have very little street frontage, but go back a long ways – the reason? The British taxed based on frontage, not square footage. As you might imagine, during the colonial period conditions were pretty miserable. Multiple families lived in tiny cubicles, as many as 15 shared a kitchen, and the bathrooms – which were a bucket in a closet in the kitchen, were, shall we say, not optimal for that capacity.

Many of these buildings have been torn down in their urban renewal process, but we got to tour one at the Chinese Cultural Museum that had been kept intact.

It’s pretty amazing. A family – usually mom, dad, and half a dozen or so kids, plus maybe the in-law kids when they got old enough to start getting married – lived in one small cubical type room, about 10 x 10 at best.

It makes you wonder how they managed to have more kids, but some questions are better left unanswered. All their worldly possessions were in the room, along with inventory if they sold something or equipment if they had a trade.

If you were too poor to rent a room, you could rent a cot in the hallway.

One would hope that he didn’t get the cot with the bathroom on one end of the hall and the man with the prostate issues on the other. It could make for a lot of sleepless nights.

The front of the building, at street level, was usually commercial retail space – in this case, a tailor’s shop that apparently operated until the early 1970’s by the look of the pictures on the wall.

It was every bit as bad as the old tenement houses in New York City (try reading “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” for a review of those conditions, if you need one). The advantage (?) here would be that it doesn’t get as cold, although there’s certainly no air moving in their, either.

They were, as you might imagine, incredible fire hazards. We’re not sure the addition of 220 volt electricity was a big plus, either. For some reason, it’s a lot scarier than 110.

The pics here show the decorations for Chinese New Year which are out on the street. The group in the workroom of the tailor’s shop.

Examples of food dishes, that were displayed on the wall; and

Money that was offered to the ancestors as thanks for a safe passage from China to Singapore.